Hello, and welcome to the Deutsche Bank Deposit Receipts First Investor Conference, dbVIC. I'm Zafar Aziz from the Deutsche Bank team. I'm pleased to announce our next presentation will be from First Pacific Company Limited. Before I introduce the speaker, a few points to note. Please submit your questions in the questions box. Also, all today's presentations are recorded and can be accessed via the Deutsche Bank website, adr.db.com. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome First Pacific Company Limited that trades on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange using the symbol 142 and on the OTC markets using the symbol FPAFY.
Thank you very much, Zaf. As some of you may know, First Pacific and I have been together with dbVIC for many years. It is a very important highlight of our year and of our outreach to investors, particularly those people who are managing money that do not know us so well. As you can see here, this investor presentation covers our full year numbers for 2024. I do understand we are deep into May now, and if you wait a couple of weeks, we will update this presentation with some first quarter numbers from the companies we are invested in. Do please understand that they will be very similar to the 2024 full year. You are not missing much by looking at what you have got in front of you now.
Now, the table of contents, when you've downloaded this on your own screen, all these page numbers are clickable, and I invite you to click through as necessary when you're learning about this company. Now, about this company, we have three main rules of our investment. That is, we stick to the geography of emerging Asia, which, if any of you follow the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook, which they publish in October and April of every year, you'll know this is the fastest growing region in the entire world, year- after- year- after- year. We stick to this geography. It's the people we know, the systems we know, the habits we know, the jurisdictions we know. We stick to four main businesses. You can see them here. They're color-coded: consumer food products, infrastructure, telecommunications, and natural resources.
Within this, we'd like to invest in companies which are monopolies or very, very big in their industries. Indofood, for example, is the world's biggest maker of wheat-based instant noodles with a capacity of something like 36 billion packets a year. About 60% of that is in Indonesia, and the other 40% is the rest of the world, mostly North Africa and the Middle East. You may have noted that I've just described three regions where everybody likes to eat halal food. That's crucial. Infrastructure. Metro Pacific Investments was newly privatized about a year and a half ago by us. We own about half of that company, as you can see in the notes down there. It controls some very important infrastructure companies in the Philippines, like the biggest electricity distributor, Meralco, and its power generation unit, MGEN. Pacific Light Power, the biggest LNG-fired power plant in Singapore.
Main Alad, the biggest water company in the Philippines, which is about to have an IPO on the Manila Stock Exchange. That is going to be in about the middle of July. Over in telecommunications, we have a little over a quarter of the biggest phone company in the Philippines. That is PLDT, and its mobile brand called Smart. Underneath PLDT, there is a digital bank, a fintech called Maya. PLDT owns about 38% of that. Other shareholders include Tencent, the IFC arm of the World Bank, and others. It is a bit of a sleeper and could be a huge kit to pump up the value of PLDT, also a listed company sometime down the road. Over in natural resources, there is Philex Mining Corporation, PXP Energy, and our plantations business under IndoAgri, which is mostly palm oil. Philex Mining is kind of a personal favorite of mine.
It produces copper and gold, and it is developing a new mine, which will open production maybe first or second quarter of 2026, producing copper and gold from very, very rich ores. I do not think that expectation is in the share price as of yet. I am very excited about this mining company and its future contribution to First Pacific in the years ahead. Now, here is how everything shapes up as our gross asset value. As of the end of March, all the things we owned were worth about $5.3 billion. The biggest one of them is our 50% or so of Indofood, as you can see here, 35% of our GAV. That is followed by MPIC, PLDT, Philex, and some other things together, a little over half a billion dollars. Last is PLP. That is the power plant in Singapore. That is how we look.
It's been a pretty stable structure for the past several years because all of these businesses are either growing very, very well or they're strong providers of big dividends. Now, how did our year look, 2024? It was the fourth year in a row of record high profits, and we celebrated that by giving our shareholders record high distributions to them. In 2024, they got the biggest ever dividend from First Pacific on a per-share basis. Because we have a progressive dividend policy, which is a commitment to raise our dividend every year, year in and year out, in subsequent years, you can expect that each year will show another successive record high in distribution to our shareholders. How cool is that?
Management is so confident of earnings growth over the medium term that we feel we can make a commitment like that to our shareholders of an ever-rising dividend. Now, of course, if something goes wrong, I mean, you were all wondering what's going to happen now with this tariff chaos we've been seeing in the world in recent weeks. That reminds us that surprises do happen, and we might be compelled to break that commitment, but we don't see anything on the horizon to make us break that dividend promise to you. In fact, we are a port in that terrible storm of tariff chaos because whatever happens with tariffs in global international trade, it will have negligible direct effect on First Pacific or our companies. We expect to continue doing very well, notwithstanding the tariff troubles.
These numbers here, the charts on the right, rather, they show you what has been delivering the earnings growth, and it's been led, as you can see in the middle column chart, by Indofood, followed by MPIC, and then the others following. The top chart, as you can see, shows very strong growth in the contribution from all these companies and the recurring profit, which is in that blue line, which is progressing up very nicely. The bottom chart shows our cash income, which is very important. Our opening cash was about $71 million on the 1st of January. We have our dividends and fees, fairly high. We expect in the years ahead, dividend income to be $300 million or more. That distributions paid, that's money out to shareholders. That number is going to be growing every single year. How do we pay for that?
Let's have a look at our balance sheet and so on on this new slide, page six. We have got investment-grade credit ratings from S&P and Moody's. We're very proud of that. We've had these ratings for about, oh, four, yeah, about four years now. As you can see on the column chart on the right, we've got no debts falling due until next year. That's some bank loans of $200 million. The way the banking industry relates to us rolling over our bank borrowings is very simple and easy for us to do. We've only got one bond outstanding. As you can see on the pie chart, it's less than a quarter of the total. That's due in 2027.
Our preference is for maybe two bonds or even more, about half of our borrowing being the kind of long-term maturities that you can most easily acquire when you're issuing a bond. In any case, our interest cost is a little over 5% as of the end of 2024. Maturities are shorter than we would like, three and a half years on average. The main thing, if you're a debt investor, to look out from us is, when are we going to come back to the market and issue another bond? The short answer is, I don't know, probably before 2027. We'll have to see how markets develop over the next several months to a year and a half. Okay, now we'll look very briefly at Indofood. That's our biggest holding. Their revenues rose again to another record high, 4% last year, to over INR 100 lakh crore, well over.
The core profit rose a staggering 16%. I think if you look at the first quarter numbers, their core profit grew by another 10%. Their earnings driver really has got to be the noodles business, where you can see in the blue box, the EBIT margin is consistently over 25%. This company knows how to produce instant noodles that are widely loved because look at the growth in volumes that they have, and they do it extremely profitably. If you were going to buy just one share in our stable of companies at First Pacific, you might think Indofood could be the one. Particularly if you're a long-term investor, I think Indofood's a big winner for you. As you can see, ICBP, that's their separately listed packaged food business.
Noodles is the biggest sales driver for them there, which just goes to show that as you get a fast-growing core of people around the world for whom instant noodles is a dietary staple, we're expecting that number will grow in the years and decades ahead. That means you've got a pretty safe bet for growth at IndoFood and ICBP in the years ahead. That huge importance of noodles inside ICBP, as we can see in that right-hand column chart, is going to continue over in the years ahead. IndoFood, as you can see here, again, we've got the instant noodles driving the growth. How important are they? As you can see in the blue box on the right, 46% of all sales at IndoFood is just the noodles alone. In second place is Bogasari. That's their flour and pasta business.
A distant third is the dairy business. That's milk and ice cream and butter and so on, with only 8% of their sales. Okay, now let's skip over this selected time series data, which when you're doing a deep dive, you must look at, particularly look at that cash line in the middle box, $2.4 billion of cash Indofood is sitting on at the end of 2024. It'd be very interesting to see what they do with that money. Will they buy something nice and interesting like Pinealle, which they bought five years ago? Time will tell. Now, our second biggest holding is Metro Pacific. Here's a reminder of the assets that it owns. Power, toll roads, water are the main ones, followed by healthcare, the biggest private hospital business in the Philippines, and then some other smaller businesses which are there for growth.
Now, here's a brief understanding of the shape of MPIC and what it means to First Pacific. As you can see, we own about half of MPIC. The second biggest shareholder is GT Capital. They're listed in Manila. They're followed by a government pension fund in the Philippines called GSIS. Metro Pacific is a joint venture between Mitsui & Co. and the Japanese government. Management Investment Group at 7.7% is led by our very own Chief Executive, Manny Pangilinan, who sold his shares in First Pacific to part finance his stake in MPIC. Inside Management Investment Group, there are some other senior figures of the Philippine business world. All of that translates to 25% of our gross asset value. That's at the valuation we used when we privatized MPIC a year and a half ago in October 2023.
There are those who claim with much justification that MPIC is worth a lot more than we say. This is discussed later in this investor presentation. We might run out of time before we can discuss it among ourselves. If that happens, look at it on your own. Any questions, follow up by dropping me a note at john.ryan@firstpacific.com. The details are all at the back of this book. Now, as you can see on the bottom right chart, their earnings have grown from strength to strength. They've had several successive record highs. I think 2021 was a record high, so that would be four in a row that they've had up through 2024, over $400 million expressed in dollars.
As you can see from the pie chart, the biggest contributor there is going to be the power business, Meralco, with almost PHP 20 billion of contribution, followed by toll roads and water. I think in the first quarter numbers, water has taken second place after power in terms of contribution because the toll roads business has got an increased interest bill after buying a 673 km toll road, the Trans- Java Toll in Indonesia, which connects the biggest, wealthiest cities of that country across that long, skinny island of Java. Now, MPIC, as you can see, dividend income as it is a holding company is very important, and it keeps rising like ours to record high levels. 2023 was when we had a record high. There is some borrowing data here as well. Their average interest rate, as you can see, is a bit higher than ours.
They pay 5.4%, whereas we pay 5.1%. The appendix in the back of your investor handout will give you many more details on MPIC borrowings and the borrowings and balance sheets of the companies it's invested in. Quick look at Meralco. As you can see, it also goes from strength to strength, the biggest company under MPIC. In this earnings chart on the top right here, we've broken down the sources of revenues to make it quite clear what each part is delivering. When you get your interest bill, you've got just one number, the amount you have to pay. As you can see from the blue shade in this column chart, the vast bulk of that is the generation. That's money which does not go to Meralco. For Meralco, it's just a pass-through.
Where Meralco earns, the revenues for Meralco gets profit are from the distribution, the others, and the energy fee. The energy fee will grow in the years ahead as it builds out its own electricity generation business. There are some details on that on this page here and on Meralco's own investor presentations. That company is listed in Manila. We have only got a brief time here, so we will have to skate over to the toll roads business, MPTC. The map here on the right-hand side shows you their toll roads that they have in the Philippines. As you can see, that is only a small fraction of all the toll road traffic that we have got looking at that column chart on the bottom. Most of it is in Indonesia.
That is going to remain true, I think, for the next few years because it is just simply overpowering in terms of its dominance in vehicle entry numbers. It is a very good steady business. As you can see, revenues rose by 16% in 2024, and core profit rose almost by double-digit numbers. We do expect year in and year out for this company to see continuing growth of its profit to successive record highs. It is a really wonderful business. With the fast economic growth in this part of the world, you are going to see more cars, more people driving on the roads. This here gives you a snapshot of all the toll roads that they are invested in. If you are a data fiend like I am, you can drill down into this page later. Now, a quick look at Maynilad.
I think I mentioned it will have an IPO in July, the 17th of July. That is coming after it has managed to increase its average effective tariff, as you can see on the bottom right, for several years in a row to very high levels. I think at the end of the first quarter, it was well over PHP 60, maybe PHP 63 per cubic meter. As you can see, apart from a downturn in 2022, they have had pretty strong earnings growth, most recently because of the implementation of long-delayed tariff increases, which under the previous presidential administration of Duterte were held up. A couple of years ago, Marcos came back into power, and he gave us our tariff increases as described a little bit here. You have your healthcare business and your light rail. They are very small contributors, albeit important in their own way.
We won't dwell on those. Let's go over to the phone business, where at PLDT, you've got your fixed line business, you've got your mobile business, and you've got your business services, particularly data centers. If you're looking at the change in service revenues, which keep going from record high to record high, you can see it's a growth in data that is the big driver in the revenue growth, as you can see on the bottom right there. Mobile data and fixed line data are the big pusher uppers, as we might say, for the earnings growth. EBITDA also at record highs, and we'll probably see record highs for revenues and EBITDA again in 2025.
Profit at PHP 35 billion or so for 2024 is a fair bit down from record highs we saw a decade or more ago when people paid an awful lot of money to use SMS services. With the arrival of 3G, came lots more competition, and ARPU, average revenue per user, got hit hard, and it was fantastic for the consumer, not so great for the phone companies. What is great is their dividend policy, that 60% of core profit, and that's very important to First Pacific and the other shareholders. At PLDT, we expect to see in 2025 what we saw in 2024, low to mid-level single-digit earnings growth. That'll translate in dollar terms to higher dividends coming to us. Now, because we've little time, let's look quickly at Maya.
That's the digital banking unit of PLDT, which after years of development has finally moved into profitability as of December 2024. They will report their first quarter numbers very soon in the next few days. We can expect continuing positive news about Maya. Now, the interesting thing about the Philippines is everybody's got a phone. There are more SIM cards out in the Philippine population than there are people, but half or less than half of everyone has got a bank account. If Maya is able to capture this half of the country, which is unbanked but possessing a phone, then they will basically be opening up a gold mine, as it were, in terms of the potential for earnings growth. I mean, look at the cumulative loans dispersed column chart down there, or the deposit balances.
These numbers are rising at such a pace that you never ever see in mature market banking industries. Now, let's carry on over to our power plant in Singapore. That's Pacific Light Power. They had a record high year in 2023 when a mismatch between supply and demand really benefited the producers and PLP most of all because we had a fixed contract on our fuel prices, which gave us an advantage over the other producers. PLP produces about 8% or 10% of all the electricity consumed in Singapore. We've won an award to build a 600-megawatt hydrogen-ready power plant, and that'll open up in 2029. In the meantime, we're building a 100-megawatt fast- start power plant, which will, I think, open up later this year. It will be turned on when peak demand requires a sudden burst of new power.
We're quite hopeful about earnings growth at PLP in the years ahead. Now, again, my personal favorite, Philex Mining. Looking at the earnings chart here at the top, it does not look terribly exciting, does it? You have earnings declining one, two, three years in a row. That is because the mine that it is operating has been going for about 60-some years. The grades, as you can see in the box, are not very good. Grams of gold per metric ton, 0.236. % of copper, 0.18%. These are very, very low grades. In fact, if you are going to express the gold concentration in parts per million, you would have 236 parts per million. That is a very, very low grade. It is still managing to produce some profits, albeit only $13 million in 2024. That is ahead of the opening of their new mine, and that is called Silangan.
Look at how the grades compare over there. Grams per ton of gold in the top blue box, 0.7. % of copper, 0.5%. So half a % of this rock you're holding in your hand is copper. And you've got something like triple the grade of gold in it. We'll begin production in the first five years at 2,000 tons a day. Though it has to be said, with gold prices where they are right now, we are considering, are there ways where we can finance greater CapEx to bring that production up to a quicker rate, maybe hit 4,000 per day more quickly than in year six. In any case, Philex Mining, it's listed in the Philippines, PX.PM, personal favorite of mine. I think it's been listed for over 50 years, and I think its best years are ahead.
Now, I will take a brief moment to go over some performance numbers. Looking at page 30, we've got our adjusted NAV per share from the end of 2022 to the end of March, just a month and a half ago. An important number for many investors is the share price discount to our net asset value. If our share price at the end of 2022 was $2.33, which it was, and the value of our assets was $5.79, then you've got a discount of 60% to the value of our assets. Basically, you're getting it on a fantastic end-of-year sale, weren't you? 60% off. That number improved with the share price going up by one-third. That number improved to 55% discount. I think in 2023, the share price increased, was it 45%? Anyway, up to $4.51 and the discount narrowed to 38%.
We're at $4.71 by the end of March, and the discount was down to 35%. As of today, our share price is something like $5.40, so it's still rocking along. Why is that? I think there's growing confidence in our earnings growth. There's growing confidence in the growth in the dividend we're going to send to our shareholders every year. I think there's growing investor interest in the equity markets of emerging Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, where our businesses are based. It has been helpful that we have now got analyst coverage from Citi. As you can see here, Citi suggests our gross asset value is $8.8 billion, very, very high. They've got a price target of, I think, $7.40 on First Pacific, whereas CLSA, I think, is $6.60, $6.40. In any case, reach out if you need help accessing their research notes on First Pacific.
For these two companies, they say our value per share is much higher than ours. Citi says $13.80. CLSA says $11.30. I have a feeling I'm running out of time a little bit. I'm going to check back and see in a moment how many minutes I've got left. The main point is Citi says our MPIC stake of almost 50% is worth almost $3.5 billion. We say it's $1.3 [billion]. CLSA says it's worth even more, $3.6 billion. That's all fascinating stuff to me. The way they break down their numbers are on the following page of this presentation, where they say the various parts of MPIC and what those things are worth. Now, our contribution and profit summary table here breaks down the contribution from all the companies. You see our corporate overheads run at around $20 million a year.
Our interest expense, I think it's safe to say, probably peaked in 2024 and will be coming down. Now, the next several pages, this book runs to 50-some pages. They provide some very useful information to you, such as seven years of contribution and profit from 2018 - 2024. That is followed by some per-share data and some very key ratios. Even after the enormous increases in share prices we've had over the past couple of years, our recurring PE is still only 3.6 times at the end of 2024. The dividend yield is still a very respectable 5.7 times. We are very much an attractive company for those who are not holders. The time series of this per-share data shows you how our dividend payouts and profits have increased over those years. Then we've got a snapshot of our debt and cash flow.
I did mention 2023, our dividend income of $324 million was the highest ever. In the years ahead, we expect $300 million or more. Here is a longer-term look at what we have been doing with our money over the past several years. As you can see, every year we are paying more in distributions to our shareholders. That is the series ending with $133.2 million. Now, very important page here, page 38, is how much dividends we are getting from the companies we are invested in. This information is almost never reported by holding companies listed in Hong Kong or London or New York or anywhere else. Please savor this burst of transparency from First Pacific. Likewise, group net debt and gearing is very detailed. We break down some numbers for MPIC for you. It is no longer a listed company.
You have to come to us to see these details about their earnings, their cash flow, their dividend payments from the companies that they're invested in, Meralco, the Toll Roads, the Water. Then, of course, the Net Debt and gearing of MPIC and its companies. I think that will pretty much do it for this presentation. Do please drop me a line if you've got any questions. We very much look forward to interacting with you. Thanks.